Author: Hinrich Mielke, Alegri

DevOps is a buzzword - and is traded as a universal remedy for acceleration, customer focus and improved competitiveness. DevOps has led to an improvement in lead times and feedback loops.

Hooray! The direction is right! But is there enough time? To ensure that the Hana and S/4 journey does not become an odyssey, the existing SAP customer must look around for professional help:

In order to test the improved procurement of S/4, there is the possibility to set up an S/4 system in front of the existing SAP landscape - and this without a cost-intensive project, change to Hana or burdening the key users.

How can purchasing take advantage of the extended functionality of S/4 without having to switch to S/4 Hana? How does EIM turn data into valuable information? How does the edge approach lead to high performance in IoT projects? How can budgets for these innovations be released without conflicts?

This year's Sapphire was entertaining, but not insightful. What SAP really wants and where the group is just trying to keep up was not obvious in the keynotes. It remains tedious.

The digital enterprise of the future will revolutionize business models and processes and provide the workplace of the future for information workers. It is an imperative to modernize future business processes, optimize user productivity in the workplace and realize all this on a consolidated, agile technical basis.

The decision to rely on SAP S/4 Hana Finance was strategic and forward-looking for Alegri. The intended goals of the project were achieved. The requirements of the Alegri Group could no longer be met by the previously used legacy system.

As one of the major IT consulting companies for Microsoft and SAP, Managed Services and Internet of Things in the DACH region, Alegri successfully introduced S/4 Hana Finance in the first half of 2016. In this part three, the technological aspects of the realization are highlighted.

The decision was made - SAP S/4 Hana Finance will be implemented at Alegri - not on premise, but in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. And as with every implementation project, there are some fundamental decisions to be made at the beginning.

The company is taking giant steps and moving very purposefully in the direction of Hana and S/4. This impression was confirmed once again at Sapphire, which took place in Orlando in mid-May 2016. Hasso Plattner personally emphasized that SAP Business Suite will of course be further developed.

S/4 in the MS Azure cloud is a Sapphire premiere, presented by SAP CEO Bill McDermott and MS CEO Satya Nadella. Who will win the race for S/4? HEC, AWS, T-Systems or Azure? SAP partner Alegri chose Azure and has already implemented it. The CFO is very happy with the result.

The location of the Norwegian opera house alone is spectacular. Snow-white and built as a peninsula on stilts in the fjord, the building is reminiscent of a floating iceberg. In short, the architecture is a perfect match for the landscape. That is also the goal in IT.